I like the idea of giving out little favours to guests at our party, but don’t want to spend a fortune on them. The perfect solution is cute cookies for everyone to take home. And you can easily vary this according to the seasons.

The problem with gluten free cookies, is that many tend not to keep their shape, making them better suited for e.g. round cookies rather than novelty cookie cutters. But if these yummy cookies made from corn flour come out the oven the same shape you put them in. Perfect for this endeavour!

Ingredients for 20 large-ish cookies:

450g corn flour*

90g corn starch

a pinch of salt

210g margerine

200g sugar

2 sachets of Vanillin OR two teaspoons of vanilla essence

ca. 100ml cold water

*I actually had a gluten free flour mix, which already included a mixture of corn flour and corn starch, so I just used 540g of that. In Germany I use the Schär gluten free flours, in the UK I bake with Dove’s Farm flours.

Directions:

Rub together the flour, starch, salt and butter until you have something resembling coarse bread crumbs.

Rub in the sugar and vanilla.

Add the water bit by bit, kneading everything together until you have a nice, smooth dough. The exact amount of water will vary depending on what flour you’re using.

Wrap the dough in cling film and chill in the fridge for 2 hours. Don’t keep it in there much longer, or it will get too hard to roll out!

Place the cookies on a baking sheet lined with grease proof paper and bake in the oven for 10-15 mins.

Leave to cool completely before icing!

To decorate the cookies, I just mixed up some icing out of icing sugar and water and added drops of food colouring. Food colouring here in Germany seems to be less bright than in the UK (and probably healthier for it), so they all have quite a pastel look about them. I used little squeezy tubes of icing for the details and tiny sugar balls for the eyes. Make sure to check the ingredients when using sprinkles etc, as many contain wheat flour!

Once the icing had dried, I packaged each cookie in a cellophane bag and sealed it shut with these cute “Happy Hallowe’en” stickers from Casa di Falcone.